First, a fairly major announcement. Not too long after our Kickstarter launched we reached a deal to privately fund major aspects of remaining development for Laika Believes. We didn’t get those details finalized until last week, so we wanted to keep the Kickstarter up in case something different happened. This might leave you asking: “well why did you start a Kickstarter if you were trying to privately fund the game?”

A few quick notes. Aside from lots of design duties, my job is to make sure we can continue development of what we’re working on. This means, essentially, always being open to different funding sources. At the time our Kickstarter campaign launched, Kickstarter was our best option. We’re happy to be funded no matter what, but it was rather unexpected that we’d be able to privately fund what we were asking for. However, we’re not at all regretful that we started out with this campaign, because because meeting and getting to talk to folks excited about Laika Believes is awesome.

Since we’re now not in need of $100k from our backers, we’re going to take this specific campaign down and launch another campaign for far less. Tomorrow, we’ll launch another Laika Believes Kickstarter where we’ll be asking for $20k. Why do we still need the money? What we have privately covered takes care of the majority of remaining development for us, but it leaves out extra aspects of sound design that we really want in the game (more ambient sounds, better implementation of effects in the engine, taking the time to implement sound more perfectly into the scripting system, etc.). In addition, one of things we learned in our first 20 days of Kickstarter and Greenlight is that our game has a wide, international appeal.

Localization is always something we were planning on, but not until we had a nice showing of sales so we could afford to patch in localizations later. I see now, of course, that it would be a disservice to many of our fans to wait on localization. The money we’re asking for on Kickstarter will cover necessary costs associated with localizing Laika Believes: The Sun at Night into Spanish and Russian languages, with more to follow as we explore our growing community.

We know that $20k is still a lot of money, so if you’ll indulge us and follow us over to our new campaign, you’ll find rewards and stretch goal margins are intact. We’ll be throwing our existing updates up on the new campaign and releasing new updates as we continue development on the game.

As far as specific game-related updates go, we got some good news about Microsoft’s new commitment to creating a more open development platform for independent studios. In addition to their new Xbox One policies, there’s a rumor swirling around that it soon may be much easier for indies to publish for XBLA. This is great news for us and bodes very well for a timely XBLA version of Laika Believes.